A daily bit of learning, cut-and-pasted from your and my favorite online encyclopedia.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Reality porn

[The 'reality' virus infects everything...]Reality porn is a genre of pornography where staged scenes, usually shot in cinéma vérité fashion, set up and prelude sexual encounters. These scenes may either have the cameraman directly engaging in sex (see Gonzo pornography) or merely filming others having sex.

For legal reasons, the vast majority of all so-called reality porn involves professional actors and actresses posing as so-called "amateurs." Ironically, even though the women who perform in these films typically appear on many reality websites within a short span of time, most of these websites claim that each female is an amateur....

Most, but not all, reality porn features disparaging attitudes towards women. For example, several reality websites refer to their female stars as "bitches", "sluts", "bimbos" or "whores". The male participants often openly ridicule the women's intelligence, subject them to degrading sexual acts, or both. Some series, including Bang Bus, feature plots in which women are offered money for sex; the women are almost invariably depicted as being humiliated and abandoned without payment (in reality, the stars are under contract and get paid beforehand). The women notably also always accept the offer, though often after some considerable persuasion, another characteristic of a degrading attitude.

In response to these attitudes, several sites have emerged in recent years which both critique and confront the presentation of women as submissive, sexualised objects by allowing the contibuter themselves to be in control of documenting their own eroticised image. The most prominent examples being ishotmyself.com and beautifulagony.com, both of which encourage ordinary people to submit their own images and video.